Autumn Stack | 2

There are so many words involved in being a bibliophile and by that, I don’t mean the words themselves but more so about the process of reading, of stocking up To Read piles. 

I was nearing the end of Sourdough & wasn’t quite ready for the book to be over. Which got me wondering whether there was a word too, for prolonging an ending & resisting its conclusion?
  So I paused my reading progress & looked around for another so I could still stay within the un-concluded realms of Lois Clay, the Clement Street starter & the Vitruvian.
  Chancing across the Bookery, I’d picked up Austenland. A Mr Darcy theme; hopefully a fun, lighter read when in between books. Or avoiding endings. 

I liked it enough. 
You do have to suspend your disbelief to get behind the concept that women would pay actual money to sign up for a Regency immersion experience with its rigid Code of Conduct. 
Interlinking chapters by boyfriend recaps certainly aids the reader’s appreciation of Jane’s past love affairs: the crushes, the relationships, the disappointments. 

But it did also bug me at times… I sincerely hope to never read another ‘Zing!’ in my life. Not the most believable of interior monologue moments, however heroine Jane is finding her way through proceedings. 
   I also wondered if Hale was consciously over-egging the pudding with her signifiers of the fact that the grumpiest man in the room couldn’t possibly be a love interest despite the very characteristic being stamped through as Total Darcy. Perhaps the reader is meant to know she can only be fooling herself but then wouldn’t an Austen reader be far smarter about that?

Having Martin’s character with the IRL intrusion was a good foil however & — spoilers! — aided the neat twist that even that seemingly covert flirtation was still overseen & orchestrated as part of the package.

She had seen her life like an intricate puzzle, all the boyfriends like dominoes, knocking the next one and the next, an endless succession of falling down. But maybe that wasn’t it all. She’d been thinking so much about endings, she’d forgotten to allow for the possibility of the last one, one that might stay standing. 

                                                                                                                     [192] Hale, Shannon. Austenland. 2007

I can take the novel’s tied-up-in-a-bow ending. Although my own learned experience rather resisted the flippancy present in “There’s bound to be work for an attractive British actor..”  

— Yes, mate. No visa required, just come on in. Mm!

I discovered Hale's Alternate Endings later whilst reading further online. And well, a part of me could’ve easily taken Independent Jane instead, minus any kind of rom-com conclusion in its entirety. 
That said, having seen a few clips of the movie's trailer, a confrontation in the airport between Jane’s Regency rivals strikes me as being much more palatable than say, having one’s apparent love interest fly halfway across the world to turn up on your doorstep. Romantic? Nah, sorry. Somewhat weird & stalker-ish? Mhmm…

I liked it enough; a fun, lighter read whilst between other books.